One Woman's Life

houghtfully, "aren't you goin

this formidable p

school any mor

olid pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation, and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling m

go to school?"

e only

tember," Milly pr

emp la

h school until

hed, with a little grimace. "I h

ol,-far from it. Only by real labor had

I went to weren't m

pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not "refined"-she knew that now. No, she did not wa

o know a lot of stuff-stupid

plaining that a girl like Milly, with no social background, might marry "to advantage" on her looks, but she would n

e some music less

r friend persisted flatter

Milly admitt

rma

k her head

at

! What

f Latin. It's ...

emps read together a great deal. They aspired to "stand for the best things" in

girl's knowing all that?"

the house accounts when there were any, and was bright and entertaining enough to a

eful when one travels,

avels," Milly

lectual, that came with a Good Education. She described the Ashland Institute, where

lady-speaks all the modern languages and has such

o the expense of buying one privately for his daughter. Of course Milly knew that there were fashionable boarding-schools. She wanted to attend a Sa

the only proper school for his daughter. So the following September Milly was once more a pupil, enrolled in classes of "literature" (with a handbook), "art" (with a handbook), "science" (handbook), "mental and moral philosophy" (lectures), and French (La tulipe noire). Milly liked Mrs. Mason, a personable lady, who always address

ileged few who could afford "superior advantages" the ideas about women's education were chaos. Mrs. Mason solved the problem at the Ashland Institute as well as any, with a little of this and of that, elegant information conveyed chiefly in handbooks about "literature" and "art"; for women were assumed to be the "artistic" sex as they were the ornamental. There were, besides, deportment, dancing, and music, als

was pronounced a triumph. It was certainly a masterpiece of fearless quotation.)... Learning passed over Milly like a summer sea over a shining sandbar and left no trace behind, none whatever. It was the same way with music. Milly could sing church hymns in

g she got with the absurd meal of schooling,-a vague but influential something,-an "ideal of A

referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the new world. This was the "formative

nfluence" in life, especially men's lives. She got it also in what books she read,-especially in Tennyson and in every novel, as well as in the few plays she saw. There it was embodied as Woman of Romance,-sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to reform, ennoble, uplift-men, of c

r humanity. Ordinarily this heavy ideal of her sex did not burden Milly. She obeyed her thoroughly healthy instincts, chief of which was "to have a good time," to be loved and petted by people. But occasionally in her mo

ody with a delicious sense of mystery that would some day be revealed, then plun

uing the species. (But in those days they did not talk of such things even in the handbooks, and Milly would have called any one who dared mention them in her presence a "materialist"-a word she had heard in the philosophy class.) Having no one to mention to her such improper truths, she remained in the pleasant illusion of literature and religion that she was altogether a superior creation,-something myster

they called Educat